Jewish Nonagenarians: Ordinary People

Jewish Nonagenarians: Ordinary People - Extraordinary Lives

Jewish Nonagenarians, available from May, was a book idea which evolved by accident, rather than by design. Around 2012, I had the pleasure of meeting spritely nonagenarian Bernice Clarke, who was a regular customer at the Southend pharmacy where I worked one day each week. Intrigued by Bernice's Eastern European accent, I enquired as to her provenance and discovered that, at 5 years old, Bernice (Bracha) with her siblings, parents, and extended family (the clan) had decided to uproot and emigrate from Poland to Palestine, becoming the first hoteliers on Mount Carmel. Sensing a fascinating story, I interviewed Bernice for our CV. I was not disappointed. Bernice described a difficult life growing up in British mandate- controlled Palestine: she was to eventually meet and marry a non- Jewish British quartermaster sergeant and emigrate with him to England, whereupon a family was raised. The family hotels, the Haganah, the early conflict, was a distant but very clear memory.

Enter now upon the scene Otto Deutsch (*1). Otto was a kindertransport refugee from Vienna, living in Westcliff, now a loved and respected member of our Shul. Knowing Bernice, Otto took me under his wing and offered to introduce me to a few other 'interesting' nonagenarians, whose stories, he felt sure, would be of interest. The first introduction - to Scarlett Epstein - took me to Hove, Sussex. Scarlett, who also hailed from Vienna, was a retired anthropologist who had fled to Albania via Yugoslavia with her parents following Hitler's annexation of Austria. Albania was the only country prepared to offer visas to Jews fleeing Nazi Europe. Her subsequent story - with five perilous flights to England with her mother, narrowly escaping over- zealous Nazi personnel in the process, was pure drama. Eventually pursuing a career in developmental anthropology, Scarlett lived among tribal communities in India and Papua New Guinea, finding a sense of belonging, hitherto undiscovered.

Freddie Knoller was another of Otto's fellow Viennese friends. Freddie and his wife, Freda, were a charming couple, and Freddie, a natural communicator, had a warm and fluent style which he put to good use as a Holocaust educator. Fleeing Austria to Vichy France, he had left his beloved cello behind in occupied Belgium – a fact he very much, at the time, regretted. After venturing back, unsuccessfully, to retrieve his musical instrument, he ended up in Paris, where, helped by his blond ‘Aryan’ looks, he was able to pass easily as a German, using forged documentation. Earning a living by pimping for the Germans – meeting soldiers on the steps of the Metro - he introduced them to the seedy delights of the Parisienne night-club scene around the red light district. Leading, in effect, a double life, and witnessing the round-ups of Jews by the gestapo (ably abetted by the French police). Freddie survived by removing himself as far as possible from his fellow Jews – in effect removing himself from himself.

After meeting Freddie and Scarlett, I began to be aware of other nonagenarians with inspiring but totally different stories to tell. My friend, Michaerl Yaffe, introduced me to David Arkush who was the camp dentist in a notorious Japanese prisoner of war camp. Professor Colin Shindler introduced me to Michael Sherbourne, who, following two periods of Aliyah, went on to become a leading light in the campaign to free Soviet Jewry. I met the inspiring artist, Suzanne Perlman, who, with her husband, Henri, had fled Rotterdam just before German occupation for Curacao, in the Dutch Antilles. Discovering a centuries old Sephardi community on the island, Suzanne found a gift for painting, and went on to become a renowned artist.

Along with the effortless supply of Jewish nonagenarians with incredible stories to tell came the realisation how they had all lived through and survived one of the most turbulent times in history. Spinning into the doom and gloom of World War II, like some gaping black hole, they were to all emerge blinking into the post war devastation, dislocation and rebuilding which was to follow. Not everyone was able to be slotted so neatly into a pigeonhole: Donald Zec, a Daily Mirror reporter, had a “good war”, going on to become a friend of many of the foremost movie stars of the day, at a time when the nascent American film industry was hungry for a slice of the action in the cinema chains which were mushrooming in post war Britain.

Not every subject of this book survived major trauma – yet all demonstrated, in their own ways, tremendous resilience of the human spirit, and a remarkable capacity to ‘get on with the job in hand’ until the end. At the very least their stories deserve to be read, as testimony to the survival power of the human spirit.

*1 There was always a twinkle in Otto’s eyes when we met: a mere octogenarian himself, he looked forward to reaching ninety when he, too, would become a worthy subject for my book. Sadly, this never happened.